


you've got something for me

by enemeriad



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Iron Man (Movies), Iron Man - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Captain America: The Winter Soldier Compliant, Everyone loves Nat, F/M, Iron Man 3 Compliant, Or: how the Avengers become the Avengers, Oral Sex, Twisted and Fluffy Feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-25
Updated: 2014-06-25
Packaged: 2018-01-24 08:32:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1598390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enemeriad/pseuds/enemeriad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In between personal crusades and terrorist attacks and the world almost coming to an end and all of them losing their jobs (twice!), this is the story of how the Avengers became the Avengers and also how Clint and Nat became Clint and Nat.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you've got something for me

Only an idiot would take down an invading alien species with a bunch of strangers and then decide to co-habitate with them. Which is why, presumably, Stark suggests it, half-ingested shwarma still in his mouth. At the time, they refuse. Natasha and Clint have jobs to do, Thor has a home of his own to return to and Steve has a world to reacquaint himself with before presumably SHIELD ropes him back into active duty.

But Bruce?

Tony has enough shiny toys to keep Banner occupied for a long while but really, Bruce enjoys the company of someone that is more interested in Bruce than the Hulk. And without the world coming to a destructive end, the Avengers part ways. It is, after all, a team of specialists, not a babysitters club and Stark Tower, much to Tony's chagrin, is not a club house. But Pepper knows how to sell a story and the newly rebuilt, R&D headquarters of Stark Industries that is powering New York City lights with clean, renewable, non-exploitable energy? 

Piece of cake.

 

 

Another thing about saving the world? The world kind of wants to know you.

And while SHIELD can allow stuffed plush toys of Tony and the Hulk and Cap, it cannot allow its Agents to become franchises.

Not for the first time, Natasha and Clint get wiped from the internet. Clint is put out. As he says to Tony, 'think of all the women though. Tragedy.'

 

  

It turns out however that even after defeating a bunch of ugly skateboarding exoskeletons, there are still morons that want to pick fights with you.

'...what like the fruit?' Clint snorts.

'Mandarin like the language,' Maria says, wearily.

'And who's being sent to assist?' Natasha cuts in, before Clint can scoff derisively at the lack of imagination terrorists have these days. He leans back against the couch, fiddling with the SHIELD issue medical bracelet on his wrist, itching to take it off she's sure.

He looks softer here, his hair longer but duller, his face unhardened from the rigorous training schedule. But his eyes had caught her when she'd first arrived. Clarity and ruthlessness. Clint's demons had surfaced and shimmered behind his eyes.

There's a pause over the comm before Hill speaks. 'No one. Fury wants to keep this out of house.'

'Whoah, he's letting Tony _Stark_ handle this himself?' Clint asks, leaning over Natasha to grab the TV remote, and switching it on.

'At the moment, its not a situation, I think there's a high - ....Uh. I'm going to have to call you back. _Over._ '

Natasha frowns a little. 'They're getting more ruthless,' she mutters to Clint as he flicks through the channels. '..not Dora,' she spits out when he pauses on her face as she starts singing shrilly and irritatingly to Diego.

The archer grins at her and keeps clicking through. 'Eh, they're culpable for all the crap they pull. Fury's got the DOJ on his ass now.'

'That's true - hey, stop! Turn it back. What was that?' she says, swatting him.

He obliges her, pulling up a smug smile as she settles her arm on his as the screen flicks over to an immaculately dressed woman, speaking feverishly in German.

'God fucking damn it,' Clint says, sitting up immediately.

'Should've sent in some back up,' Natasha agrees quietly.

Even with fluent German between them, the photojournalistic montage really sells it. Pictures of Air Force one being blown to bits in the sky while tiny free-falling humans litter the skyline and traffic cam snaps of Iron Man almost getting hit by a truck are recycled for the entire evening.

Natasha feels an uncomfortable twist in her stomach, almost bordering on a twinge of guilt. Tony Stark wasn't exactly her favourite person, she much preferred Iron Man herself. But. Still. Natasha knew a little something about camaraderie and while it wasn't one of her most virtuously proffered traits, she feels a pang of irritation that SHIELD hadn't stepped in to lend a hand. Yet as Maria had quipped to them, 'you don't give someone a carrot on national television and expect them not to bite,' before she'd snapped at them to get their shit together and come back, Tony had to a certain extent brought this on himself.

 

 

They're packing the jet on the return when Agent Sitwell walks up the gang plank. Natasha notices Clint frowning and shuffles past him to greet their old liaison. 

'Romanoff,' Sitwell says and then when he notices Clint at her flank, he gives him a tight nod. 'Glad to see you're doing better.'

Natasha doesn't have to see Clint to know he's grimacing at the Agent. A month in Lucerne at the SHIELD psychiatric facility hadn't exactly done wonders for Clint's disregard for authority. In fact, she was pretty sure he was now even more smarmy. But from what she'd heard of the therapy sessions, which had only been in dry asides from Clint, it was just as cliché and unhelpful as she'd thought, so she shouldn't have expected anything more. 

Still, she'd requested to come and pick him up. Natasha had argued that she had to see if he'd levelled out before she let him anywhere near her with any sort of assault weaponry. This was as good a test as any. Sitwell had been their substitute CO when Phil had been unavailable. Clint's eyes tightened as she glanced at him. It was guilt and fear demarcated in crows feet. Grief was an entirely reasonable response. Not that she felt some sympathy towards the man. Sitwell seemed to delight in leaving them in sticky situations. She nudges Clint and he visibly relaxes beside her. Natasha has to acknowledge that she hadn't come because she'd thought he was dangerous. She'd come because she had missed seeing him.

Jasper eyed them both before he straightened his tie. 'I need a ride to the Triskelion, would you mind?'

Natasha nods before Clint can speak. 'You should put a parachute on though,' she says, with mocking sincerity before she starts walking up the gangplank. 'Might get a little bumpy.'

 

  

'...are we okay?' Clint asks, when they're seated in the cockpit.

Natasha stops her pre-flight checks for a half second before resuming, but he notes her hesitation just the same.

'Look.. Tasha.. I just..'

'No, Clint, we're good,' she says, flashing him her teeth as some sort of semblance of a smile. 'Stuck here with perfect skiing conditions, it's a wonder you want to come back.' It feels false and saccharine to her own ears, too.

He frowns and glances back at their passenger. 'Sitwell was here to clear me for duty,' he says.

'And?' Natasha asks, before switching the mic on and getting them cleared for take off. She's unsurprised that they'd sent Sitwell to do it, perhaps the only Agent she knows that is ruthlessly objective towards his Agents.

Clint just shrugged. 'I must be fine. They're shipping me out.'

Natasha notes that he doesn't look convinced, his palm tightening over the thrust as she replies to flight control that they're ready. 'Actively?'

Clint just shrugs, grazing his hands through his hair. 'Sure. Probably going to show me off like the poster boy for bad behaviour.'

Natasha rolls her eyes at him. 'Hill isn't going to let you dawdle. You're too valuable.'

He nods. 'Great,' he says, sarcastically.

Natasha frowns and places her hand, uncertainly over his, but she feels him stiffen and purses her lips, moving her hand away under the guise of adjusting the wing flaps. She wonders who it was he'd directed his concern at to begin with.

 

 

Stark calls her when they land and she waves Clint over before she puts her phone on speaker.

‘…..and he actually _emailed,_ I mean the man’s basically a computer whiz now, he’s somewhere in Jersey or something. Apparently, and this might not even be true, probably complete crap but he’s on SHIELD payroll. He _asked_ to work for them. Bat shit crazy, if you ask me, but then that’s why you two work there.’

Clint smirks.

‘Just tell me this, has anyone showed him Star Wars yet?’

 

 

She's in Volgograd when she finally gets a call back. She is also a little preoccupied.

'Ya huh?'

'Natasha? It's me, Pepper.'

'Oh, I know,' she says airily, digging her heel into the assailants rib. 'Nice of you to get back to me.'

Pepper makes an embarrassed huff, disguising the sound of the man's broken skull to her own ears. 'Well. It has been.. busy.' 

Busy is an understatement but Natasha appreciates the bullshit euphemism all the same. 'I heard,' she tells Pepper curtly, as she bends over her marks now unconscious form to log into the mainframe, 'that you've been experiencing some hot flushes.'

'Not your garden variety flushes,' Pepper says.

'We could put you to good use here in the north. You could be my personal radiator.'

There is a light exhaling of air, which Natasha thinks is the closest Pepper has gotten to a real laugh in weeks. She thinks that if she were a normal person, she would've flown to see Pepper as soon as she found out. But instead, she's in north-eastern Russia standing over a man whose laundry list of crimes is comparable to her own, data mining his laptop, talking to a woman who she is not really friends with but respects a lot, about her newly induced superpower.

'How's Tony doing with the cure?' Natasha hedges after the silence has stretched a little thin.

'Getting there.'

Natasha stops typing and frowns. 'So tell me, why did you call me in the first place?'

'...you called me,' Pepper replies, a little taken aback.

'No, I was just returning your call, which you then missed. Why did you call me first?'

'Oh,' she says. 'I just. I guess there's no one else really.'

With that, Natasha decides to call in more often.

 

 

It's not like she _ever_ sees Banner or Stark. And yet, according to Snapchat, they're her two best friends.

(Why she would want to see short clips of the Avengers figurines in increasingly more elaborate skits is beyond her, but they amuse her just the same.)

 

 

She never gets the pleasure of going out in the field with Cap before some shady mark tap in downtown Hong Kong. She'd seen him around SHIELD, even spotted him having lunch with Clint after the archer had gotten back from his psychiatric sabbatical ('not a fucking holiday,' Clint had growled at her) but never went past respectfully nodding at him when they passed in the corridor.

But missions are missions and there's always one that will require a specific hodge podge of talents. Such is her luck that she ends up cuffed to a young biochemist in Kowloon City who while capable of creating weapons out of kitchen scraps cannot help her escape from an empty warehouse lot.

'I'm sorry,' the young woman proclaims after a short pause in which Natasha carefully dislocates her joints to try and get herself out of the cuffs. The spy huffs.

'As far as this situation goes, you've nothing to be sorry for,' Natasha says. 'I need you to spit on the cuffs. For lubrication,' she contextualises after a beat.

The woman, a stout brown-haired SHIELD operative, simply shifts and does as she's told. Natasha likes her. Zoë. She had woken Natasha up as soon as she'd come to, the young chemist introducing herself as the liaison.

'It should be surprising,' Zoë, says to her as Natasha attempts to prise her thumb out. There is a sickening clicking noise as Natasha's finger bends inappropriately but Zoë talks over the noise. 'I'm a scientist. Like. Huh. This whole situation should be foreign. But it's just like.. SHIELD. You hear stories about this all the time, it's not even a little bit exaggerated.'

Natasha shrugs, manoeuvring her wrist out of the lock. 'They try and prepare you for the -'

She's completely muffled by the sound of the metal door being thrown off it's hinges. It flies across the room like a paper plane, almost weightless against its attacker. Lo and behold, Captain America stands behind it looking irritated. Zoë lets out an understandable squawk and Natasha sympathises. Because Cap is a sight. Even when you're freezing, starving and captured.

'Traffic?' Natasha says, making conversation while she frees Zoë.

Cap actually looks dismayed.

'Did you get it?' he asks her, eyeing the SHIELD insignia on Zoë's arm as permission to talk freely. 'We thought you'd be held separately,' he says, more to Zoë than to Natasha, as the redhead hands him the disk drive disguised as the zipper pull on her cat suit.

'They don't know who she is,' Natasha supplies and eyeing the door, now jammed awkwardly into the window, the penetrating sounds of gunfire outside, she says, 'I take it we're not going out quietly.'

Cap shrugs. 'What can I say? It's peak hour.'

 

 

It's happy coincidence that they're both at base at the same time, or rather, that she is because Clint is put on 'reuptake' or mandatory training, a degrading and humiliating process of recertifying for his clearance. She spends the rest of her leave glaring at Sitwell's shiny, smug, superior head for inflicting this on Clint.

She finds him in the gym, wrapping his hands for practise. Hill stands beside a young blonde man Natasha only recalls by face.

'Romanoff,' Deputy Hill greets as she walks past with a curt nod.

'How long until he's cleared,' Natasha asks, wearily.

Maria's eyes flicker to Clint and then back to her with a small smile. 'When he's ready.'

Natasha just sets her expression into schooled indifference. She hadn't expected a more direct response, anyway. SHIELD loved their stupid guidelines. Half of them they rarely adhered to and those of the more arcane variety they wielded with little distinction.

'How'd it go?' she asks once she gets over to him, and then perches herself on the fence between the targets. '10/10 for form?' she teases.

Clint huffs at her and then jerks his head in the direction of Hill and her assistant. 'They might let me get five or six if I ask nicely.'

Natasha frowns. _Level Six? '_ What gave you that impression?' she asks tersely. Because Clint had been level eight and looking at the underbelly of nine when everything had gone up shit creak. He'd be back to junior oversight and training of recruits on a seven. But most importantly, he would lose the privilege of choice.

He just shrugs and then a little miserably, 'I wouldn't get to pick my gigs. Or my team.'

She felt every frustration force itself out through her teeth in a low hiss. 'This is fucking stupid,' she mutters, swinging down onto the floor. 'You don't deserve this,' she grits out and then comes to stand before him. He looks almost ashamed, puts down the tape and shrugs.

'It is what is it is.'

Natasha scoffs. 'Don't give me that bullshit. I've never known you to be a defeatist. If they give _you_ of all people anything less than a seven, you should--'

But Clint just shakes his head. 'I would say that's a lil’ rich coming from you, though, huh, Nat?'

Natasha blinks at him. Excuse me? 'What's that supposed to mean?'

'I mean that you haven't so much as stood a foot near me since I got back,' Clint says, his voice laced with disdain.

'What are you _talking_ about?'

He rolls his eyes and then when she just stares back imploringly, he just lifts up his hands in defeat and takes a few steps back from her.

'You can take your pity and--'

She can't help the shock on her face but she cuts him off with a look of disgust. 'Suit yourself.'

 

 

'No, he needs _me_ ,' Natasha snaps back and recoils when she realises how it could be misinterpreted and how lacklustre that sounds in light of everything. Clint doesn't even _want_ her around, obviously wants to stew in his guilt. But Natasha can't really allow that. She can't just let him go on, isolating himself. Digging himself into a deeper hole was not a scenario she wanted to entertain for him.

And at the most selfish level, she missed him. Three days he'd cut loose from HQ on medical leave and for three days she'd chewed herself out trying to rationalise going after him. But he'd told her to shove it and that was exactly what she was going to do. For the most part. Forcing Maria to give them ops together was not _strictly_ implicated. Or, so she thought.

'There is safety in familiarity,' she tells Maria before her C.O can cut in. 'There's no Phil anymore. I've all he's got and I know better than anyone what's going through his head.'

Maria doesn't even blink. 'Romanoff, I believe I told you fifteen minutes ago that your assignment has been forwarded to you.'

Natasha's lips purse together in a thin, angry line but insubordinate she is not.

Maria rolls her eyes. 'Go read it before you snap at me. You're dismissed.'

 

 

Which is how the two of them end up in Stockholm, as Asha and Carl Sohn, an affluent couple looking to purchase a new vintage car from the prominent German auctioneer, Van Ham. It is a simple intel snatch and grab, purpose-built for reacclimatising Clint to the field.

'She was giving me that whole speech,' she says to Clint, 'like _if shit goes down_..'

Clint stares ahead, his eyes firmly on the road as they round onto the autobahn.

Natasha glances over at him and hits him in the arm as hard as her awkward position will allow.

'Ow!' he yelps and turns to glare at her. 'What the fuck, Tash?'

'Stop feeling sorry for yourself. It's pissing me off. You saved the world and you're still acting as if you owe it some sort of debt.'

'Hypocrite,' Clint replies, darkly.

Natasha's eyes flash angrily and she punches him in the shoulder again. He doesn't even flinch this time. Faker.

'We're talking about you. The deal is one of us has to be somewhat sane at all times.'

Clint's jaw flexes and Natasha leans back, lazily.

'This is your first op since New York,' she hedges quietly, still walking on that tense surface of apologetic and unrepentant in light of their argument and then waits for him to speak. Clint is tense behind her, like a coiled spring. But it's not anger that is simmering beneath the surface, she thinks. It's fear. Natasha tracks the muscles in his arm, all the way up to his neck, where his anxiety is throbbing. She doesn't even think about it when her hand comes to rest on his leg.

Clint flinches, guiltily but she doesn't move her hand this time. He doesn't brush her off. It is something.

She waits.

'Hill sent you because Fury wants someone to keep an eye on me.'

'Yup.'

Clint glances at her, obviously surprised she didn't lie.

'But I told her it had to be me,' she offers, when he doesn't say anything further.

Barton's arms flex but he's quiet for a long time, eyes on the horizon. She thinks perhaps that he thinks of it like pity or something equally stupid. But really, it is an intense need to fulfil a cavity within him that she knows she cannot. In some sense the uselessness of the task only pushes her to try and fufill it more. He has demons she can't not contemplate, nor repair. And yet, she wants to.

Natasha has almost forgotten they were talking, takes a short panorama of the countryside, littered with late blooming sunflowers to send to Banner hashtagged '#roadtrips' because Bruce likes them.

'Why?' Clint says, startling her into pressing send before she's ready. She pouts at the lack of filter before she eyes her partner.

'Why what?'

'Why did you think it had to be you?'

Natasha admits in the moment that she has not taken the time to examine her rationale beyond the fact that she does, to a certain extent, understand the process he's gone through.

'I know what it's like,' she reminds him quietly, barely audible over Clint's acceleration. The car returns to a hum as he merges into the far right lane and settles into sixth gear.

'It's not the same,' Clint mumbles after a long pause and Natasha grits her teeth. What the fuck? Well, yeah, sorry there wasn't anyone at SHIELD that had been poked with the glowstick of armageddon so that their eyes turned blue and they became Loki's puppets.

'I can be empathetic,' Natasha spits out, feeling like his pity party has taken on marathon proportions.

Clint glances over again, frowning at her. 'I meant between us.'

Natasha's phone buzzes as Bruce replies with a heart eyes emoji, but she looks straight ahead at the road and doesn't say anything in reply.

The distinction he has demarcated in their relationship, now vocalised, hurts to accept.

 

 

'When can we go home?' she all but growls at him as he puts a full bottle of vodka down in front of her. Stockholm could loosely be termed productive and at the very least, Clint would be put back onto active duty.

Asha and Carl Sohn had purchased a (stolen, surely) 1964 Aston Martin Zagata, at a black-tie auction. 

The mission plan was that while Asha signed the paperwork, Carl would "debrief" with Van Ham's lawyers, safely storing them in the upstairs disabled bathroom until the fire alarms went off and the contract was conveniently lost in the evacuation. In the meantime, Asha would have enough time to hack his private inventory and find out the location of Van Ham's holding centre. At their go ahead, SHIELD would infiltrate and loot the black market arms hold while Nat and Clint flew back to the States, retaining cover and ensuring appropriate alibis for the heist.

But nothing was _ever_ that easy, and Natasha found herself clinging to the down pipe after Clint's ' _they know we're here. but they don't know who we are_ ,' text message. She could hear the quartet playing Vivaldi's Summer downstairs while she waited until the room she'd been in had been swept by the police (because they were on the payroll now too, clearly). She heard them give the all clear, and pushed herself up and over the ledge back into the study. Clearly, Clint had not been able to set the alarm off. She would have to improvise. Get the coordinates, find Clint, and hopefully, walk out of the party acting as if they were _not_ the American spies somebody had tipped off Van Ham about.

Switching the computer from sleep, she cracked into the mainframe and did a quick search for their ghost drive. The cobweb of broken links and empty folders was not what she expected. She would have to copy the whole thing. She eyed the Windows Vista hardware with disgust before she stuck the SHIELD drive, disguised as the zipper on her dress, into the processor.

  _Hawk-I_ : Rndev @ base, 0230

Natasha glanced at the door and swore. Either Clint was talking his way out of the situation or he'd already left. Either way, the PC pinged blearily and she ejected the drive with vehemence, shoving it down her front and practically leaping over the desk in her haste to get out. Her stomach twisted uncomfortably. She had two options: keep up appearances and walk out or risk exposure and a failed recon of the arms.

She pressed her ear to the door, hearing only the noisy conversations and laughter from downstairs. She moved to open it when her phone buzzed.

 _Hawk-I_ : 'Gt the hell out of dodge. Now.'

Well fuck. 

It took her fifteen seconds to rip her jacket off, shove the drive safely in the inseam of her bra and her phone into her pants and leave her heels. Screw incognito. She shimmied down the drain pipe, as she heard the music abruptly stop as she landed softly in the wet grass. Natasha set off at a sprint towards the south west side of the property where they'd stored weapons.

She could hear people screaming and the bile rose in her throat. Clint's text message hadn't exactly given her any indication of his whereabouts. Her feet barely felt the change in terrain as she tore across the gravel road. She was in no position to check on him attired as she was. As it happened, the property shouldered a small lake and they'd dropped their tactical gear in the boat shed. Clint's compound bow was still where they'd left it. She grabbed her spider bites and a revolver and put her boots on. She didn't feel scared, she felt sick and her hands shook with the clarity of worst case scenarios that were going through her mind. Visions of icy blue eyes and Clint's assault. Every weak spot and vulnerability he knew used to advantage. But she was nothing if not professional. Natasha activated the emergency tracker and left the drive inside the boat shed with the rest of their gear.

She checked her phone one last time (nothing) before she ran back up to the house, shoving a fresh magazine into the case as she worked her way through the trees to the front of the home.

  

 

People were flooding out of the house, dripping wet. She could hear the screams as she rounded on the front of the house, keeping to the shadows. She watched the guests scrambling for their cars and frowned. So Clint had activated the fire alarms? And then run? And then hid? And then gotten his compound bow? Had they just missed each other?

Her heart slowed as her tactical conditioning kicked in. She scanned the crowd for Clint and sent him a text message. 

 _Widow_ : 'R U en route'

Her objective was Clint and as soon as she knew he wasn't captured or worse..

Van Ham stood on the porch, sopping but otherwise chatting cordially to a tall, stern looking Korean woman Natasha recognised was his wife. Natasha frowned, looking for his guards but there was no one. Either he was a moron with a police force on speed dial but no private security or he was a moron with extensive hubris. Either way he was a moron. But one that looked completely at ease even after a threat. She eyed the lot and saw that their SHIELD sponsored Bugati Quattroporte was still in the lot. The choice had had less to do with expediency and more with Clint being a snob.

So Clint was either still here or he'd left in someone else's car and left her the sportscar. But she still couldn't leave. Not just because he was her partner and she'd _promised_ this would go smoothly but also because she was completely dry. Even if Van Ham was stupid, he wasn't _that_ stupid.

Her closest source of water was the lake but Natasha felt uneasy about wasting time to look the part. Especially because in about five minutes, their car was going to look a lot like a giant red X in an emptied lot. Her choices were narrowing down to immutable decisions.

With that, Natasha sprinted towards the car. Undercover had gone out the window.

 

 

She had severely, severely underestimated Van Ham.

 

 

The man didn't have to have personal security when his wife was a one woman battalion. Natasha _almost_ has her pinned, when the older woman digs her claws into Natasha's face and then uses her momentary distraction to cuff her in the face with her palm. Her teeth chatter together horribly and she thinks she feels every bone in her jaw crack before she slams Mrs. Van Ham's skull into the concrete.

She eyes Mrs. Van Ham's smashed car dubiously, feeling only sorry that she hadn't managed to kill Mrs. Van Ham in the wreckage but only pulverise her own escape. Instead, she ejects Clint's mix tape from the CD slot before she drop pins her location to Hill with a 'sorry about my parking' text. Her phone buzzes twice in quick succession.

 _Hill:_ 'The clean up team is on their way. VH has been taken in. Arms recovered. Recommend you take civilian return Stateside.'

 _Hawk-I:_ 'don't wait I'm @ Base.'

She takes in a deep, deep breath and starts walking.

 

 

All in all, it was a productive trip.

 

 

'What the _fuck_ Tasha,' he had scolded, before he gave up being angry with her and set the vodka down in front of her.

'When can we go home?' Natasha growls, drinking straight from the bottle. She feels a little smug entitlement that she'd gotten in four minutes before deadline. Like a _pro._

'You shouldn't have waited for me,' Clint says, pulling gauze out of their luggage.

His self-righteousness makes her furious. The fact that he had dawdled with his reply, the fact that he hadn't somehow told her things had gone up shit creek. Had he expected her to mind read? Or was she just supposed to leave him, alone and vulnerable and move on with the mission while he could've been dying somewhere?

Natasha glances uneasily at him as that thought hits her and she realises he's right to be angry at her. She was in the wrong. Mission's are precarious and Clint had gotten caught up in hot water before. She had stayed because she had underestimated him and overindulged her emotions. That was the brutally honest truth. It hit her, her uncomfortably accurate analysis of her decisions looking so incredibly irrational after the fact.

'You should have replied faster. I don't have time to spare while you're choosing what emoji to use,' she mutters, irritably.

Clint huffs out a strangled sort of laugh. 'Van Ham's attack dog came after me,' he explains, 'But I managed to get lost in the guests. I got a lift with this lovely couple from Marseilles who knew quite a bit about Van Ham's extracurriculars. I passed them onto Hill when she came in to pick up Mrs. Van Ham.'

Natasha frowns a little, but that did explain why Mrs. Van Ham had _known_ Natasha would still be around. It was also why Hill had given them a twelve hour LOA. It was practically gold stars from her. 

'Great. Hopefully we can leave soon. I actually used to like Stockholm.'

But she trails off, swigging some more of the vodka and Clint remembers the better ops. They'd been here plenty of times. They even used to fuck here. A lot. Mainly because SHIELD had some _sweet_ safe houses in Scandinavia. 'She really got to me,' Natasha mumbles after a long pause, patting Clint's bandages down.

 'They should put that in reports. Wife of your mark probably went to school with May.'

 Natasha squints up at him. 'That's racist.'

'Yeah,' Clint agrees readily, taking the vodka from her and taking a sip.

 

  

They almost have sex that night because Natasha is out to prove that everything is exactly the same. New York fucked them but it didn't fuck them up. They're still the same old Nat and Clint, a specialist team. Strike Team Delta. They were a class of their own. A mythology SHIELD Agents whispered about. Agents and partners that sometimes had sex. She wanted Clint to know he could handle himself. That he was fine. That they were fine. That they were back to being Clint and Nat. The _old_ Clint and Nat.

But she can't blame it on being drunk, she can't even say adrenalin clouded her judgement because she sets the pace and despite how earnestly she is trying, it is the most terrifying intimate thing they've ever done. _She_ threads her fingers into Clint's when he starts to suck her cunt. And when he slows down, sweeps her back from the edge, she kisses him viciously, trying desperately to keep some semblance of desperate need in it. Because back then, way back, they used to do this to let off steam.

They worked in sync in the field but in bed it was like fighting fire with fire. They were insatiable. She remembers pushing and pushing and pushing until their release somehow wound them all the way back up again. She needs _that._ She needs the Clint that kissed her, muddied and bloodied in a helicopter in Sarajevo after they'd seen the children lined up like match sticks. She needs the Clint that she beat into the ground, beat into submission when he trusted her too much when she first got into SHIELD. She needs the Clint that wouldn't touch her for a month after he watched their assignment get raped and killed in front of him when their captors realised her ransom didn't rival his.

She needs the anger. The intensity. The lust.

In some cruel way, Clint knows or perhaps senses and doesn't give it to her. Or maybe, she has changed and everything feels different. Or perhaps, for him this is some sort of intimate atonement. Whatever the rationale, Natasha feels an obscure sense of loss. Everything is stupidly complicated. Changing. She hates it. She hates that ultimately she overstayed her welcome on an operation because of _feelings_ and that logic slapped her in the face for it. She knows that Clint had realised this before she did, probably wondered why she hadn't touched him since New York and realised that it was because she was so intent on giving him the space he needed and not just demanding they fix/fuck each other.

He is quiet and intent and giving with his own agenda and Natasha feels her eyes burn, so she closes them. She closes them and pulls Clint up, until he is hovering over her. She can feel his gaze over her. She is sure he is surveying every inch of her but she screws her eyes shut tight, feels the tightening off her cheeks as the flesh nail wounds reopen and perhaps if Natasha can't cry, her flesh can provide substitutions.

She hears him sigh and move and she is acutely aware that she is completely clothed and yet she feels completely stripped. Bare. In that split second, she does almost feel tears threatening her because maybe they can't have anything anymore. Maybe she _feels_ something that isn't how Clint feels and even that sense of companionship and partnership they had will be irrevocably changed because they both don't know how to adapt to such a monumental shift.

The thing is, Natasha always had Strike Team Delta to fall back on. When SHIELD needed clean up, (and when didn't they?) they sent in Nat and Clint. And sure, they didn't always have assignments together but they often did and she has never been a part of SHIELD without Clint. It is unimaginable. And yet she knows that if she can't have a personal relationship with him, it will take time to acclimate to their professional one.

She feels so selfish. She feels so god damn selfish because they always had each other, _this,_ whatever _this_ was for relief. And now she only has the memory of her heart in her throat when Coulson told her Barton was compromised and the way his eyes had glowed.

She feels the bed depress beside her, and one hand slip under her pillow, as the duvet covers her. He doesn't explicitly touch her and perhaps there was no invitation but Natasha turns into him. He doesn't say anything when she curls her palm around his neck. His even, human, _Clint_ -like pulse hums her to sleep. Otherwise, he does not touch her. She'll take what she can get.

 

 

In the morning, they go back to their three foot radius of each other and it’s actually a relief.

 

 

They catch a red-eye to Vienna, taking advantage of the cover the morning business rush provides. His hand on the small of her back, 'Carl Sohn' guides his wife through the airport, Asha surreptitiously checking for strays in her compact mirror.

It isn't until they're seated in first class on a direct flight to Atlanta with a private connection to the Sandbox for debriefing that Clint seems to drop the act. He shrugs off his tie, rolls up the sleeves on his shirt and unfolds the bed. Natasha, and she curses herself for it, misses the physical contact.

'I'll watch,' she says unnecessarily. Clint gives her a weak smile, already half-asleep.

It's selfish, she tells herself again. It is selfish to demand this proximity from him. To demand that he need her like she need him. But she can't help but watch him breathe, fingers dancing over his pulse every couple of hours, waking him up under the guise of the food service to check his eyes for signs of Loki.

 

 

You know shit's fucked up when Tony Stark calls you. No JARVIS, no Pepper nor Happy as intermediaries. Which is presumably why Clint throws her the phone like it's molten lava, looking angrily at her from the door.

'If its anything less than an alien invasion, tell him to go fuck himself. It's 2 am. God damn vampire scientist,' he grumbles and turns back around to go to bed.

Natasha rolls her eyes, and turns the reading lamp on in the barracks. 'Hullo,' she greets sardonically. 'How may I help you?'

‘Natalie. Always a pleasure. But. Well. I wouldn't call it a problem, I'd strictly classify it as an event.'

'Tony, what's going on?' she says, twisting her knees up to her chest.

'I'd suggest you get yourselves to London.'

'Specifics Stark. Why did you call?'

'Apparently,' Tony hedges carefully, 'apparently, Thor is in Britain.'

A cold weight settles on her chest and Natasha closes her eyes for a nanosecond before pragmatism overrules her. It could be nothing. Nonetheless, her eyes flash to Clint, who's at the foot of her bed looking at her tensely. She tilts her head at him, wondering if he feels any different and he shakes his head.

'No,' he mumbles and then pulls his phone out.

'And what do you want us to do about it?' she asks, watching him leave. She keeps her voice even and unaffected. Her mind is already on contingencies.

She knows Clint has nightmares about unquestionable loyalty and being unable to control the supply of information, of secrets, of the intimate details of his life, her life, their lives. She knows of nights where he slips out into the city and walks or runs or does disappears into the crowds because he doesn't trust himself to be around anyone he knows. She presumes it has everything to do with the same thing happening, Loki playing tricks. But Natasha doesn't think this is narcissism on Clint's part, that he thinks he was so important to Loki that he'd come back to Midgard to do it all again. It is fear. It is fear that he is susceptible to that sort of influence. And that is something she can understand.

Tony sighs on the other line and Natasha reverts her attention to the conversation at hand. 'Barton there too. Right. Well then, SHIELD saying much?'

Tasha frowns. 'The usual radio silence,' she grits out, as Clint exits the bedroom, shutting the door behind him.

'Well, I'd say get over there.'

Natasha rolls her eyes at the door. Moron. 'To do what exactly? We're actually doing things here, you know. Our jobs. Saving lives.'

Tony clicks his tongue impatiently and Tasha knows that exact expression of his: entitled and irritated. 'Please. SHIELD says jump and you say how high.'

'If I wanted a lecture on ethics, I wouldn't call you,' she says, evenly.

'Whoah there. Hit a nerve? Look, I just thought you should know. So that if you know who decides to you know what again, you have a heads up.'

Natasha presses her head to the door of the room and sighs. '...thanks Tony,' she says, uncomfortable with the admission and yet sincere in the address, 'Keep me posted.'

'Sleep tight, twinkle toes.'

Natasha rues the day she let slip that she used to dance. Throwing the phone onto the bed, she stalks into the kitchen of the safe house. She grabs a bottle of wine from the cooler and two glasses and slips into the living room to sit down next to him, while Clint stares at his phone.

'You think they would've called,' Clint murmurs, as she uncorks the bottle.

'They haven't called because they know you're fine and they don't need us. This doesn't necessarily mean anything,' Nat presses.

Clint huffs disbelievingly and takes the glass from her. 'Sure.'

 

 

She still has nightmares about New York, too. They used to be about the Hulk, but he would morph into a dark, black expanse that kept pressing her down. She couldn't run, she couldn't fight, she couldn't breathe. She would wake up, paralysed in fear and for the four or five seconds it took for her mind to set her free, she would scream. Every limb refused to move, sunken into the bed. She would wake with the same crippling fear of helplessness she had in the dream.

She couldn't handle it after two weeks, couldn't sleep but couldn't stay awake, her hands shaking anytime she got near her weapons that never seemed to work in her nightmares.

Eventually, she tells Clint, who just nods and slides a bottle of sleep medication over the table to her.

'Two an hour before bed.'

That night, she dissolves them under her tongue before she falls asleep.

It is a recurring hell. It starts off bright, well lit and she's just walking down this corridor. For some reason, in the dream, there is a purpose she can never recall lucidly. It gets darker and darker and she starts to run. And she knows that if she can get to the end, just so close, she can help. There’s never a door, never an escape, she just keeps walking.

The space between waking and sleeping, the seconds that she had no control over her body, she was useless and incapable to block out the echoing screams.

 

 

Maria gives her the blueprints of a seedy warehouse in Toronto she gets to "strategically disarm", a SHIELD euphemism for blow sky high. Clint gets a small-time arms dealer in Denver. Natasha feels his eyes on her even before she glances at him. She doesn't say anything as Maria eyes them both. Their SO says in not so many words that they're too valuable to be paired off all the time. The reality is that SHIELD feels they have indulged Clint's recovery long enough.

She can feel his eyes boring into her as Maria runs over the ops with them. There is no need for the other to oversee ops they're not involved in but they both ignore the covert dismissals Maria vocalises and sit in, silently. Natasha can already feel the sense of displacement. It's irrational, of course, as they're never really going to be apart for more than a week or a fortnight here and there at the most but it is different now. It's been almost a year since New York. Things have changed. She can't say how much she doesn't want it to shift again. But she doesn't question their orders, stares out at the constructed digital scenery at HQ as Clint talks strategy with Hill.

It isn't until they're back at the Triskelion, Clint packing for his 0600 flight that he speaks.

'I know you think I'm not ready,' Clint mutters, fastening the locks on his recurve's case, 'but I don't need to be babysat anymore.'

Natasha frowns at him from his bed, her eyes tracking him as he crosses into the bathroom. 'No,' she says, a little surprised that that was his assumption and a little affronted that he didn't see it as partnership.

Clint sighs, back turned to her as he grabs his toothbrush. His eyes are closed in the mirror reflection. 'I'll be fine. It turns out I'm an excellent shot, brainwashed or not.'

Natasha winces at the bitter tone and gets up, coming to stand in the door. 'I meant, no, as in I do think you're ready.'

Clint turns, leaning against the basin. He is uncomfortably withdrawn. 'Then what is it, Tash? Because I know it's not how much you hate the cold.'

She shrugs. 'No, it's the Canadians.'

The laughter bubbles out of him and Natasha thinks it is the stupidest best thing she's ever heard.

 

 

Clint is fine, in fact, from what she can hear, she's pretty sure he's ready to pack and bag the whole operation. She knows it's stupid to be checking in on him and yet here she is, activating the tracker on his suit and hacking into his comm.

She had justified it to herself by reasoning that if she didn't find out if he was okay, she would fly to Denver and check (and fuck it, she'd been this close to doing just that) but what with SHIELD purposely scheduling their flights so they didn't overlap, she had taken matters into her own hands.

And the prospect of not seeing him for another week had not even come into question.

There is a distinct clicking noise as Clint unclips the safety on the M107 automatic and she closes her eyes, visualising the scene. There is a quiet breeze she can hear and then she hears him smirk to himself before three distinct shots are fired.

She stays where she is, pretending to be catching up on paperwork, watching the tiny red dot makes its way across the city to the safe house where it stops.

It isn't until he logs in to SHIELD to request evac that Natasha releases the breath she didn't realise she was holding.

 

 

He gets back to HQ and finds her in her bedroom, sifting through requisition forms and half-filled out mission reports (his not hers). She gives him a terse smile and he just stands at her door, hovering.

'Went well?' she greets, quietly, tries to keep her breathing even and her face composed. 

It isn't easy, it isn't anything, a jumble of half-formed emotions that she has no reference points for. Natasha is a purpose built human and sometimes she feels like anything she actually feels is a spectrum based on things she's seen, roles she's had to play. And she doubts what she knows a lot of the time. Wonders why her breathing quickens when he's beside her. Wonders why it is _his_ presence on an op that gives her a sense of security she doesn't usually feel. Wonders why she wants to find intimacy in a man, a mere man, when everything she has ever been taught is to expunge variables from situations. 

'It--' and he cuts off, and she can feel his feet approach. 

She thinks in that moment that if he starts to yell, if he wants to punish her for not giving him enough space to deal with Loki or giving him too much space she will accept it. She won't be defensive. She will fight every instinct to rage at him until he drops the victim card and accepts that she will always push and push and push until he accepts the world for the shit show it is, that she will rally against his indulgent idealism until the end. But this one time, this one moment of catharsis she will grant him because she loves him.

But Clint has always worked in the grey area, the extraneous variability and he pulls her into a hug and breathes in like it’s his last. She stiffens momentarily but then it feels pointless to protest and she's pulling him to her just as fiercely. Touching him is a blessing but his responses are a validation and she wants to kiss him, scald him with her compassion but she just takes what is on the table and for the moment it is an embrace.

After a pause, he sags, sighs and she feels his eyelashes brush against her neck as his eyes close.

'I'm sorry,' she says, pushing her fingers through his hair. It is longer, (she hadn't realised, it's been so long, too long) and the colour of burnt straw. 'I'm sorry I couldn't help you.' She doesn't know what compels her to say it, doesn't even think it's the right thing to say but she says it anyway and he doesn't let go.

 

 

Her eyes trace the constellations of freckles on his back before she presses her forehead to the warm expanse between his shoulder blades. 

'I stayed because I felt I had to. In Stockholm. To protect you. Or something. I couldn't leave if you were there,' she whispers.

'I could've gotten out,' Clint says quietly, but wrapped as she is around his frame, she can't read his face. She exhales uneasily and then touches his shoulder. The archer turns, adjusting so he can look at her properly.

'But not with Loki,' Clint says too softly to annunciate the question.

Natasha blinks, once. _Yes._

'When I said things had changed..' Clint sighs out but Natasha kisses him, pushing them, until she is on top. She feels like a traitor because everything she wants to say is on the tip of her tongue but maybe. Maybe. She can try it again. Try to get back into that sync they had before. Before she felt like this. But mostly, she doesn't want to hear him blame her or offer to transfer or whatever.

She presses her breasts into his mouth and digs her fingernails into his hips. _Give it to me,_ she pleads silently. Clint is half-hard beneath her before she eyes him down.

'Have you got protection?' she asks, sounding cool and disaffected. Clint swallows and then nods, his eyes not moving from her.

Clint hovers beside her and in that moment, she thinks that maybe she can defy it. Maybe she can start thinking laterally and stop worrying about him, and missing him, and ignoring half-formed fears that he'll wake up with blue eyes and a hand around her throat. Maybe she can go back to using him and him using her and that somehow being better than nothing. But Clint presses his palm flat against her stomach and stares at the scar on her stomach, his fingers moving to splay over the ugly scar, remnants of someone's hasty field stitches. She grits her teeth together because she can't take the quiet in the air. Her jaw aches still, from her fight, but she'll take it over the sincerity of his gaze.

His fingers trace over the ridges of her hips and she can't help but stare at the look on his face. He looks so earnest. But it still seems to stretch too long, this exploration of his, looking at her like she's some sort of wonderful.

Natasha's eyelids flutter closed as he places his hand atop of hers and whispers, 'tell me,' into the curve of her neck. She can hear her heartbeat clattering in her eardrums, every nerve ending tingling at his touch, with a deep yearning to be closer, nearer, _connected._ She has never been _this_ affected by him. His presence. This physical need she has to be close to him when she is pressed up against his heart as she is. She doesn't understand it, has never had this emotional response before. It confounds her.

He leans over her, supporting himself on his forearms, bending down to brush his lips over hers.

'I want you to tell me why you were in Denver,' he says quietly, his gaze finding hers.

Natasha swallows and her pupils dilate. Caught and confronted.

'I could hear you breathing on the comm,' he admits, and even looks a little smug that he's figured it out.

'I wasn't in Denver,' Natasha says, her gaze level and bored.

Clint doesn't buy it, just rolls his eyes because he knows better than to argue semantics with her.

'Why'd you do it? Maria would bench you for less.'

Every fear and anxiety appears then on his forehead, and Natasha can't help but reach up, smoothing it all away.

'You know why I did it,' she says quietly. 'I _owe_ you.'

Clint sighs and she thinks, 'is that anger?', before he slumps onto his side next to her.

'You leave tomorrow,' he says, more to the ceiling, 'am I allowed to hack into your comm and breathe creepily while you murder some guy with your thighs?'

Natasha whistles. 'That's kinky.'

'Come on..' he urges, hovering on his side beside her.

Her whole face regresses into a smooth poker face and she shrugs. 'Sure.'

Clint's brow furrows. 'Nat,' he presses when she doesn't continue, 'why were you sorry?'

Natasha frowns up at the ceiling helplessly. Well damn. For everything. Nothing. For feeling like this. Rumpled, forced into a tumble dry of things she doesn’t have schema for. But right now? She wouldn’t apologise for the world. With his hand running up her waist, she feels stable. _Normal_ would be a stretch but she's not a particularist. But tomorrow in Toronto, things will have clarity with distance for her and she's not sure she will know what to do with the truth that she has carefully cultivated into a lie.

'New York changed me. Us. Whatever. It's different,' she says, because this is the truest version of things she can offer him.

He stops his ministrations, his posture squared and tense and Natasha closes her eyes. Hit the nail on the head, _for him._ She imagines he's conjuring up images of Phil and maybe the op in Guatemala that he _still_ feels guilty about because that's just what he's like.

She wants to help him, truly she does. She wants to let him open up to her, like they used to, the way she used to force him to, because she knew dealing with things openly was the only way to stop him from breaking into little pieces. But she doesn't know what to say without feeling like a liar and a hypocrite and a child because her grasp on normality is so stilted, so constructed from observation and presumption. So she says nothing.

Eventually, he says, 'yeah.'

 

 

The New Year is heralded in with quiet aplomb. Natasha and Clint had gotten Tony's invitation to both the public gala at Stark Industries and also the private after party at Stark Tower. Natasha had declined because she'd originally thought she was going to be in Herzeg Novi liaising on an a clean up with SHIELD tech that had somehow (surprise, surprise) gotten into the wrong hands. Clint had been loathe to attend without someone there to snark about the upper class' suffocating pretense with.

Instead, Natasha and Clint sit on the roof of the Triskelion with beers between them.

'Resolutions?' Clint asks.

Natasha snorts. It seems so humorous in their profession to act as normal people would. What possible use would she have for resolutions anyway? Start exercising? It was a compulsory part of her work. Stop drinking? Well, that was also a compulsory part of her work, too. Be nicer? Swear less? In the face of death, everything seemed superfluous. No matter which way she swung it, her work was difficult. Last year was long. Last year was strenuous. But all she'd thought about throughout the whole thing was that she wanted to come through. She wanted to see make it. After aliens, after gods, after everything, all the wanted to do was _live._ And so perhaps, all she wants to do, _this_ year, is make it through. There is something so buoyant to that thought, something that feels a little like pressure lifting off her.

But she keeps that to herself, point at Clint with the bottle and smiles, 'No. ..you?'

Clint chuckles, balancing his arms on the tops of his knees as they sit on the roof ledge. 'You know all I wanna do is see the flip side of this year.'

Natasha's sarcastic reply gets all tangled in her throat. 'I'll keep you safe,' she tells him, as light as she can manage.

Clint turns to look at her as if she's crazy, like he didn't even question it and she wonders if that's the point. He lifts his bottle to her and she does the same.

'Cheers.'

 

 

Tony invites them both to lunch at Stark Tower to "check out the security systems" on the coldest, windiest, most disgusting day of February.  The foundation for the visit is a blatant lie that doesn't even hold up with his A.I. who greets them and proceeds to proclaim that Tony has been both lonely and bored with only a multi-billion dollar company to design for, Pepper's 'problem' all sorted out and a live-in bunk mate that even likes to do experiments with him.

Clint snorts. 'Not even first world problems. Tony Stark problems. They're in a stratosphere of their own.'

'We've got some spare time, maybe we could create a new terrorist for him to play with on national television.'

'I wish Fury let _us_ deal with retired racist actors rather than raping pillaging morons with slush funds.'

'We could even fake our own deaths, take on psychos with only hubris and snark.'

'You know how much evil the two of us could accomplish in an afternoon?'

Natasha just grins as the elevator pings open. Standing before them is Tony being berated by Pepper, who looks about as casual as Natasha has ever seen her and she'd seen Pepper at all hours. Bruce is sitting on the couch, typing on a tablet and talking to a beaming Steve.

They all stop and in a rare display of harmony, turn to look at the two assassins.

'Well howdy,' Clint greets facetiously. 'Now this looks more like an ambush. Stark, is this dorm allocation 2.0?'

'Ignore him,' Pepper says, almost automatically when she pulls away. 'He's not planning anything. Not anymore anyway. My god. It takes a miracle to change his mind. Anyway. Sorry. How are you?'

Tony rolls his eyes and points to the full dinner table as some sort of proof? Clint and Steve have a pretty elaborate handshake (when?) and Bruce smiles at the archer and then waves at Nat before going back to his work.

Natasha smiles at Pepper. 'I'm well. I hear you're all better. Your skin looks incredible,' she says.

Humour seems to work on Pepper as she laughs airily, before motioning her over to the dinner table.

Tony is already explaining the whole Thor debacle to Clint (at least the classified INTERPOL version) as Steve saunters up to the table with Bruce at his flank. It is odd, Natasha thinks, that neither Tony nor Pepper take the head of the table. Instead, Pepper sits beside her and without any instruction, Clint takes the seat opposite her, Tony at his 9 o'clock. Steve and Bruce sit opposite each other to Pepper and Tony's left, respectively.

'I'm--... oh okay!' Tony interjects as Clint petulantly mutters what the reason for this lunch was again since it clearly wasn't 'security issues', 'I'll explain, damn, you're so pushy.'

Clint smirks taking it as a compliment.

'It isn't actually a protracted ploy to get us to move in again,' Steve asks before Tony can continue, 'because seriously, Stark, I think we've been through it enough times.'

Tony rolls his eyes. 'No, but not that it's not a good idea. It's that-' and then he abruptly stops and frowns.

'JARVIS can you shut the rain up.' The deluge decrescendos to a soft hum in the background, the thunder only demarcated by occasional flashes from behind them but otherwise, Tony is free to drum up as much unnecessary melodrama in preparation for his monologue. Natasha rolls her eyes at Clint who just sniggers in reply.

'As I was saying, we're all here today because I wanted to discuss what's been going on here and it kind of affects-'

'Sir,' JARVIS interrupts cooly, 'I believe you have a visitor.'

Tony looks more than a little put out.

'Wait, who?' Pepper asks, before the lift opens to reveal none other than an Asgardian god.

 

  

It is weirder to see Thor flanked by Darcy and Jane than Thor on his own. Somehow it's more jarring having Thor placed beside two average women in an average elevator than in battle armour, wielding a mystical self-righteous hammer. He looks ginormous in proportion. Like a walking wall.

Tony nods at them, as the rest of the team rise to greet them. Clint eyes them all warily and Natasha doesn't move to greet them either but she feels uncomfortable moving to stand by Clint, like its too intimate, too obvious. Steve has already moved past them all to say hello while Bruce hovers uncomfortably at the table with them. The air hangs over them, so deafeningly loud.

Pepper is the first, however, to extend niceties. ' _Hello._ Welcome.'

Jane and Darcy polarise the situation further with the young intern looking positively delighted to be in the company of Captain America while Jane's attention flits from Tony to Pepper to Natasha to rest on Clint for barely a moment longer than the rest of them but Natasha notices.

'Lady Potts,' Thor greets and Natasha is surprised at the grave tone.

'Well now that we're all here,' Tony says, defeated, 'Thor can explain.'

Thor nods and looks over at Jane who gives him a small smile that looks intensely sympathetic. Natasha presses the tips of her fingers into the table, feeling uncomfortable with the confusing emotional responses of the people around her. She is adept at this usually but the entire scene seems like an orchestrated prelude to some sort of funeral.

'Loki,' Thor starts with little preamble, 'is dead.'

_Oh._

Natasha watches in stunned silence as Clint's posture sags and she feels that guilt-ridden coursing sense of relief. It is over. If he is dead, it is over.

But if her past experiences are anything to go by, the immaterial never stay that way in your mind.

 

 

'Now we can feast.' 

Natasha actually _sighs_ because that was insensitive, even for Tony. She catches Clint's eye and he purses his lips together, eyes sunken and looks down at his plate. She feels so shitty now, sitting so far away from him, no way to mediate for him.

But Thor is already getting uproariously drunk, taking Tony's statement to heart, making them all toast with 'Asgardian ale, we must, it is tradition'. Bruce and Jane seem to have hit it off, chatting intimately about duh, science. In the midst of the ruckus, Darcy is bartering with Steve to get him to take his shirt off but Steve actually seems to be enjoying the conversation, not a hint of discomfort, leaning back in his chair charmingly while they discuss social politics through blatant innuendo.

Alcohol is the greatest social lubricant and Natasha clinks her glass with Thor's and very soon, Clint is just as drunk as everyone else as Thor teaches them all a funeral feast shanty, a particularity of Asgard.

Pepper, god bless her, is taking her dining room being turned into a seedy, overfull other-worldly bar extremely well. But then, Natasha thinks wrly as the two of them press their shot glasses together, she is dating a Tony.

 

 

Natasha wakes up on a futon. On a futon in a bedroom that is very much not hers. The only familiarity in the room is Clint, sprawled sideways across the bed, explaining why she now has a crick in her neck and he looks like a warm polar bear under the duvet.

She has scattered recollections of the night but no hangover, a gift of her heritage but she knows Clint will be feeling like shit, so she pushes him, all malleable and sleepy until she's curled around him and he mumbles that she's cold, so she presses her palms against his torso and he huffs at her, pulling her arms tighter around him.

 

  

They don't get up until midday when Clint's vernacular starts to function again and he says: 'we even get home?'

'You've never taken me here,' Nat says, eyeing the room with disdain. It had a very Clint vibe. Hastily assembled, with strange trinkets on the walls he'd probably picked up from various ops.

'This isn't my place,' Clint says, sounding affronted. 'Why the fuck would I have North American hunting arrows on my-'

Nat turns to look at him at the same time Clint does and they both leap from the room.

'Stark is going to fucking die.'

 

 

Tony doesn't look in any way remorseful.

'Pepper decorated. Do you like?'

Fucker. 

 

 

Natasha gets roped into a recruiting stint for the Ops centre, supposedly a tactical school for recruits but acts a little like Hogwarts for SHIELDs rising stars. She _hates_ it because there is a disgusting naivety to even the most diligent of recruits that she doesn't like seeing washed out after a few field ops. But Maria gives her a look and says 'make yourself useful.' It's a stupid lie.

She knows why she is made to it. She knows that this used to be Phil's pet project and now this is some sort of repatriation exercise. It's stupid. Natasha does not and has never attributed the ability to see the best in people, in herself. Coulson, however, actually enjoyed compiling SAT data and cross-referencing extracurriculars, looking for the intelligent, assertive, B-grade students that happened to be orphans and knew 3 languages and ran underground self-defence classes for victims of bullying. Veting these problem kids was an inherently _Phil_ ability.

She imagines that is what it was like before aliens put SHIELD forever on the map. Now kids send eager applications and obnoxious head shots like they're applying for college and not voluntary state-sanctioned slavery.

So instead of travelling out to scope out new recruits, she is seated at a desk at the Sandbox, highlighting particularly irritating self-descriptors that she texts Clint. It's not riveting work, but she keeps a tally of the corniest turns of phrases to keep herself entertained.

'I am good under pressure,' is the current front-runner.

 

 

She doesn't see Clint for two months until an op in Lagos, she gets rerouted to because everything is going to hell. It was supposed to be the assassination of a local crime lord that had gotten on SHIELDs radar in a big way what with his gallivanting around the world collecting precious metals and then using them to create weapons of mass destruction. Clint had been sent because the man was more closely guarded than the Queen and if anyone was going to get in and make the shot, it was Clint. Like every plan, it didn't go as predicted.

She completes all of her backlogged requisition forms, even gets started on her appraisals because she's too anxious to be of much use doing anything else on the flight over. When she lands in Nigeria, in the port side town, she forgoes the immigration checks with hastily assembled diplomatic visas and a shit load of flattery.

By the time she gets to the safe house, a small, ostensible pub downtown, Clint has checked in. He looks tanner than she's ever seen him, his eyes whiter than the rest of him from his sunglasses. She has never been gladder to see him in her life.

She drinks him in like the last drop of moisture in a desert, her eyes raking down his form like it's the first time she's seen him and perhaps it is that drunken heady feeling of relief that he is for the most part ok, or the fact that this is the closest she's been to him in almost three months, the first time she's spoken to him in what feels like forever, but she thinks that she's at peace. He could ask her to wade into another storm and she'd agree because at the very least she'd be standing by his side. 

He looks exhausted, his pants slashed at the thigh and he shrugs off his tactical gear as he crosses the threshold and collapses on the bed.

'I'm glad you're here,' he mumbles, into the bedsheets, bleeding something awful onto the duvet.

She pushes him onto his back, watching him bite the flesh of his forearm as she stitches his thigh up and can't help but feel a little mollified that he's said it. She tries to be _extra_ careful with her sewing.

'Bozhe _god_ , you didn't say it was this bad.'

Clint places his arm over his eyes and sucks in a breath as she pulls the stitch out from under the dermis. 'It only got dirty this morning,' he says, through obvious pain.

She winces as she works, discomfited at the thought that they weren't running up to date feedback on his whereabouts.

'Who was on oversight?' Natasha asks, drawing the wound to a close.

'It was supposed to be Theroux but he got demoted, apparently fucked up something awful in Alexandria, and they were scrambling. I told them I could wait it out, that it was fine. I didn't think anybody had recognised me. But apparently,' Clint mutters, gesturing to the gash in his leg, 'I'm now a celebrity. Moment I took my bow out, I was fucking screwed.'

She momentarily thinks about how much she wished she was there, how easily she could've been assisting instead of assigning new recruits to mentors. Instead, Natasha shrugs, ever practical, 'so how do you want to proceed?'

Clint moves his arm from his face and sits up to stare at her incredulously. Just you? Well fuck. Nat this isn't a cakewalk, believe me. I'm a liability here. I've been made. I’m of no use to you.'

She contorts her face into a measure of sympathy but she doesn’t believe that. SHIELD will, and always has been, resource efficient. They'd sent her because they’d known the two of them would be able to wrap this up. 'Then we'll clean up.'

For the next hours, while they eat up the last sun lit hours, they discuss infiltration and risk mitigation. By the next morning, Ibrahim Awolowo is dead. By nightfall, so is his Lieutenant. The organisation is disorganised and Natasha leave it to the local cops to sort out the rest. They're not SHIELDs best for nothing.

 

 

Natasha doesn't get a lot of downtime, but she gets a lot of time on planes, crossing vast oceans and continents, disturbed only by her thoughts. And the more she tries to waylay a serious introspection about the state of things with her and Clint, the more the issue won't dissipate from her mind.

They haven't spoken about Stockholm or Switzerland in any more detail than was strictly necessary and even her admission about staying to protect him felt vacuous in retrospect. She was there because New York had altered the dimensions of their relationship. When Phil had called to tell her Clint had been compromised, she had mapped out every rational response in her mind before she'd actually said anything. To turn to hysterics was not her style, but to rip Loki up into shreds, to destroy him from the inside out, that was something she could contemplate from Calcutta to Manhattan.

And now she stands in the murky unknown between friends that sometimes fuck and partners that are something more. It has a lot to do with the fact that Natasha doesn't know how to act upon these instincts. She doesn't want to just have sex, in fact, their encounters, the ones that stick out in her mind with most poignant clarity, are the ones where they were holed up by themselves in who knows where eating thai or on flights or in the middle of tactical retreats when she'd had that startling feeling that there was not a single place on the planet earth and known inhabitable planets of the universe that she would rather be than right there, saving the world or screwing it in equal measures. 

And if that is love, and perhaps it isn't the definition of the concept that has started wars or broken hearts, it is enough for her.

But that revelation is not useful to Natasha. At all. Because in their line of work there is duty, there is order and there is obligation. There is no room for an emotive variable besides responses that are intrinsic to the operation. She flounders in the face of her honesty. 

She loves him and so what?

 

 

Clint disappears on a stakeout a week after they get Stateside and Nat eyes Steve over a latte resolutely ignoring the question.

'Uh huh,' she says and then, 'well when are you going to ask Melissa, you know, from HR, out then?'

Steve smiles that all american smile, deflecting easily, 'I'm busy.'

Natasha rolls her eyes. 'Guy's gotta have some fun in the downtime,' she says.

'I have plenty of fun. Look, right now. I'm having coffee and damn if it ain't the best brew I've ever had."

Natasha smirks. 'It's the company not the coffee.'

Steve tips his coffee to her in a mock salute. 'Granted.'

 

 

She goes to bed that night with a lot of things playing on her conscious. The first is an unescapable feeling of dread for the next morning. 349 days have passed and she still feels the acuteness of Phil's passing. It is now mellowed, sure, but she still knows that it affects Clint and that in itself affects her. She remembers his hesitant gait as he picked up his mission specs that morning he was shipped out.

She'd gotten up early and come to see him off. She was there simply to assure him he would be fine, that Phil was dead but that _he_ would be okay. It was tactical, for sure.

'You better wrap this up quick,' she said with a put upon smile, as she'd approached the plane.

Clint had laughed uncomfortably before he'd turned around and shrugged, 'I'll do what I can. Are you worried I'm going to miss your birthday, Tashka?'

Nat had eyed him and then eyed him some more for the moniker, relieved his posture had loosened considerably. 'Bring me back a present. Something shiny,' she'd teased. 

'How about my bleeding heart?'

'Eh. It'll do.'

He'd rolled his eyes and dumped his gear on the bus before striding back down the gangplank towards her.

'I got Morales on the ground and Hand is on oversight,' he whispered, 'it's going to be a mess. Ali hates it when-'

But he had stopped with a laugh as Alisanda Morales had strode up behind Natasha and glared at him.

'Morning Ali,' he had teased. 'You look like you could catch some sun.'

'I'd shut up Clint,' she'd said, hoisting her bag onto her shoulder. 'Victoria is like a god damn ninja. She can probably hear you. Probably even in Florida.'

Natasha had grinned at her. 'That clicking she does, when she's not happy with your decision.'

'Irritates the shit out of me,' Morales muttered, and then looked down at her watch.

'Alright Barton, hug your wench and let's get out of here. Wheels up in five, baby bird.'

Natasha had scoffed, and felt uncomfortably aware of the fact that Clint seemed to be waiting for her to do _something._ She had thrown him a languid smile.

'Well, _baby bird,_ stay safe.'

Clint had grinned, seemed to lean forward and she had thought about how it would feel to hug him again. Instead, she had taken a definitive step back and started to walk back towards base.

'It better be expensive!' she had called over her shoulder, but she didn't look back.

 

 

Clint calls her a week from then, the morning still shaking off the shadows and she picks it up on the first ring. She has not slept. Not tonight.

'I get in this afternoon. Will you meet me there?'

'Of course.'

 

 

She doesn't know what to expect of Clint on the first anniversary of Phil's death. There is a guilty burden on his grief that he cannot seem to shake no matter how many times he acknowledges that it wasn't his fault. That at the very least, it wasn't his hand that pulled the trigger. It is different for Nat. She respected Phil immensely but he was not her mentor like he was to Clint.

She is surprised however, to see Tony and Pepper walking away from the grave as they approach it, meeting awkwardly over the burial ground of a Darla Grey, beloved daughter and sister. For the first time ever, Natasha sees the expression on Pepper's face mirrored on her own. Theirs is a sad resignation that this is their life. That this is the type of shit that happens to your best friends, your partners, your lovers. It is a selfish glimmer of relief that at least it wasn't someone closer to the heart.

The expression is so jarring on a woman that spent ten years being endlessly optimistic about Stark's chances as a functioning human being and Natasha has to look away, past the couple, to Phil's government issue white granite marker.

Pepper hugs Clint, hugs Natasha and then straightens her jacket and with a curt nod to Tony, walks over to Happy by their car. Tony watches her walk away and then sighs.

'Had so much more life to live.'

Nat and Clint nod, and she thinks that they're probably doing it for lack of words to fill the infinitesimal gap in their lives that used to be Phil Coulson.

'I wish..' Tony trails off before he grimaces. 'Steve came by earlier, that's who the hydrangeas are from. Maybe we should've done something proper.. instead of, just..'

Clint stiffens beside her and she shifts, leaning into him imperceptibly and he says, 'he would've preferred it this way,' in a soft outtake of breath.

Tony seems to relax a little, like some guilt has been alleviated and then nods.

'At least the fucker that did this is dead,' he says.

  

 

Here lies Phil Coulson.. and Nat's eyes start to burn. She threads her fingers through Clint's and they stay there until the shadows come back to swallow all the light 

'I am always going to want him back,' Clint says as Natasha feels intrusive and then embarrassed and stupid at the thought.

So she squeezes his hand. 'Me too.'

Sighing, he lifts a weary hand to his brow, smoothing the lines away repeatedly to no avail. He shifts, eyes downcast and she watches his profile under the cover of dusk, worn and heavy and tired. They are getting older.

'Don't you leave me too,' he whispers and then hesitantly glances at her.

Natasha feels her stomach clench, her grip on his palm stiffen and she nods involuntarily until her mouth catches up and she says, 'no, never,' but even as she says it, she can feel her pulse race and her palms sweat with the responsibility of those syllables.

Clint eyes her and then lets go of her hand to cup her cheeks, bringing their foreheads to touch.

'Promise me,' he mumbles, the words catching and scared.

'Promise.'

 

 

If Natasha had had her way, she would've taken him somewhere quiet, out of the way, made a toast and kissed him quietly because it would've seemed like the right time. 

But it was never the right time and the moment slipped through her fingertips like running water down a drain. She'd waited, through the minutes silence for the Battle of New York, for Fury to murmur about the obligations and the sacrifices of their work and for everyone to disappear back to their stations for duty and then Clint had hugged her, thanked her, stiffly and dutifully for 'sticking around' and she'd nodded or something or she'd waved him off, but it all didn't matter because he'd left. 

 

 

She gets a call from Pepper at six am sharp, a few weeks after Phil’s memorial.

'Good morning and happy birthday, Natasha,' the woman greets and Natasha smiles, despite herself. 

She gets a few odd looks from the early risers but she stops the target simulation and glares at the little brats. 

'How did you know?' she whispers to Pepper's brilliantly arch laughter. 

'Magic,' Pepper says but Natasha suspects Natalie Rushmore had more in common with her than she'd thought. 

'How does it feel to be thirty how ever old you are?'

Natasha huffs a little because thirty is  _still_ pretty wide off the mark but she goes with it. 'I'm starting to get junk mail about online dating.'

'Just wait till the fertility clinic spam starts coming in.'

Natasha chuckles. 'Oh Pepper. You and Stark thinking about making some babybots anytime soon?'

The redhead scoffs. 'I put the fear of god in him and then some. I don't think so.'

'Not... ever?' And it's not like Natasha had given it much thought it was just that there was not a single person that was more competent. Motherhood, Natasha felt sure, would be easy for her. 

Pepper's breathing hitched and Natasha felt compelled to divert the subject away with a 'thank you for the call' but Pepper cut her off with a tired, frustrated sound. 'There is a lot,' she says quietly, 'that we need to work out before we even start talking.'

And Natasha doesn't know if Pepper's referencing Tony's hobby of saving the world or bringing down terrorist cells or just Tony's bonanza basket of issues but she thinks maybe both.

It is a terribly human thing that makes her grateful that life is difficult for everyone.

But she chats to Pepper about lighter things like the compliment getting carded at bars still is, managing ruthless stakeholders ('I could kill Stein for you.' 'I wish. Give his goddamn tie to Asgard as a sacrifice to the gods.') and the general lack of competency of literally every human being in the world that isn't the two of them.

 

 

The rest of the day passes without hide nor hair of Clint and Natasha hates that she's noticed, that she's compared this to every other birthday since he coerced the date out of Phil. 

But around four, she leaves the research lab after Banner emails her an e-card and a giftcard to barnes and noble ('p.s don't just buy Dostoyevsky it's beneath you to succumb to cliches, natasha.') and catching up with some work because at this point, he either forgot or doesn't care and its useless coming up with reasons to rationalise why _she_ cares because fuck it, she just does. He doesn't love her, doesn't have to, but they're still  _friends_ and its still a shitty thing to do especially after he'd implied they were sort of almost maybe okay again after Phil's memorial. But maybe that was all it had been, too many messy emotions with Phil's death and she'd been the closest thing there to hold onto. Clint was the sentimental one. Maybe she'd just been a comforting affectation, a living embodiment of the better memories of their potent triumvirate and nothing more. It makes her physically stop, hesitating at her door her stomach twisting into tight, awful knots. 

Perhaps when he looked at her, he saw Phil. But they were partners. They were partners when Phil wasn't there. She was with him when Phil wasn't but maybe he didn't see it that way. Maybe when he'd said 'it's not the same' he'd meant because Phil was no longer with them and not because their partnership had irrevocably changed after Loki. She leans against the doorframe of the Hub, watching the intelligence analysts bustle around their stations, the screen above them occasionally flickering to report an event before she decides to get some actual air and not just the recycled ventilated shit they have in the observatory on the top of the building. 

She joins a gym downtown with a fake name (Asha Sohn's black Amex sitting pretty on the foyer desk) and does a class, or four, until the place closes at eleven and she trudges back to the Hub with her complimentary pink yoga mat and feels a little better about everything because hey Morales just texted her to say 'keep drinking whatever you're drinking girl u look great for forty five'. Bitch. 

But barracks is a cold comfort away from the condominium she has in New York but she hadn't had the inclination to take leave, had maybe, naively thought Clint would've just spent the day with her. 

She's  _fine._ Curled up in bed, 100% awake and zen and de-stressed from all the pilates. Except she's not. She's furious with him and well, it's not like he's far away. 

 

 

She doesn't have the satisfaction of waking him up because she can see the light under the door and she doesn't get to break in because he opens the door before she even gets the universal key she swiped from Agent Daniels in the reader. 

'Hi,' he greets, casually and Natasha goes from like 'if he says happy birthday I'll give it a rest' to 'fuck you' in the time it takes him to lean on the jamb as if questioning what she's doing at his door at midnight. 

'Busy today?' she asks, through her teeth. 

'Not really,' he says, lightly and tilts his head like he's waiting for her to spit out what she wants. Her aggressive stance dissipates and she realises she doesn't want to have it out with him at all, she just wants to go back to her room, pour herself a jug of wine and book herself a nice long op somewhere cold where she can freeze to death and not think about why Clint forgetting to wish her happy birthday (like she's a fucking fourteen year old girl and he's her crush or something) makes her so furious. 

Natasha blinks once, before she clicks her tongue and then nods. 'Well, just wanted to let you know Hill's over-riding your recertification. You're getting bumped up.'

Clint looks puzzled and she wants to slap him, the insensitive little dick. 'Oh. Nice. Thanks.'

'Night,' she says and she wants to leave, quickly and efficiently but she can't help but hesitate, trying to see if he's playing her or he's actually forgotten or he's just a dick and he wants to punish her or play her or jesus fucking christ, he's  _never_ forgotten. 

'...was there something else?'

And the way he says it - fuck. Natasha's known him for going on ten years and every single tell he has she has forced out of him but when his lip curls a half centimetre in a smug win she can read him like a book. 

'Nope,' Tash says, with a quick broken smile and she sighs, just a half breath out that she knows he hears and then licks her lips, looks to the floor and plays up the disappointment. 

'I just.. thought you'd say something.'

Clint lets out a low uncomfortable noise that Nat knows she can successfully manipulate into a full guilty confession. 

'I thought you'd come to chew me out about it earlier,' he says, almost consoling. 

Natasha frowns at the floor and then, looks up because wait a minute, _earlier?_ but notices when Clint's expression of consolation splits into a small nervous smile.

She just rolls her eyes, 'so why?'

'Stark bet me I couldn't. So I did.'

She's  _actually_ a little hurt that it was a bet. 'Wonderful,' she says drily. It feels like such a let down she almost would've preferred he'd forgotten for the guilty platitudes she would've gotten. But she doesn't want to stay and play out the particulars of his joke. 

'You're hilarious,' she says and then laughs a little to brush over how uncomfortable she feels. 'How much does he owe you?'

Clint looks at her intently and she just summons up her most indolent expression. '..I owe him,' he say, looking at her quizzically and pushes himself off the door to stand before her. It's almost too close when all she wants to do is put as much emotional distance between them as possible. She is obviously still Agent Romanoff, code name the Black Widow, the scary Russian that sometimes has sex with me, to him and she has never been someone to pick at a scab. At least not one of her own. 

She clicks her tongue at him, imitating Hand's infamous disappointment and then shrugs. 'It's never good to bet on me. I'm unpredictable,' she tells him, with a forced grin.

Clint's brow furrows and she gives him a quick wink. 'I'll see you when I see you.'

He doesn't move from the door when she turns and she takes that to mean the conversations over so she leaves. 

‘…wait, Nat, don’t you want to know what we bet on?’

She grits her teeth. ‘Couldn’t give a shit.’

And if when she rounds the corner, she stops and lets the disappointed and anger appear, there is no one to testify to its veracity.

 

 

She doesn't get any wine or make tiny voodoo dolls of Clint because the moment she gets to her door, her phone starts ringing and 'we've got a hostage situation' and Natasha's rolling her eyes because what a fucking surprise. 

She stalks into her room and stares at the innocuous card and velvet box on her side table. Innocuous save for the fact that she didn't put it there. The card is written in small, capitalised block letters. She doesn't read it, doesn't know what it says and doesn't want to start extrapolating scenarios. Instead, she stares at the box for a good second or two and then leaves. 

Apology for forgetting her birthday and then acting like a shit? No thank you.

 

 

It isn't Maria that greets her on the deck of the Hub but Fury and the surprise shows on Natasha's face. 

'Sir,' she greets with a small smile because he's practically a recluse these days.

Fury inclines his head and she watches his eyes track the take off of a supply bus. 'I'm guessing this isn’t just a custody situation?' she asks, when he doesn't speak. 

He nods and after a beat, shakes his head, wearily. 'The world has changed, Agent Romanoff. Can we change with it?'

Natasha permits him a quick nod but she is not in the practice of entertaining philosophy.

He stops short of giving her any sort of explanation but hands her a USB and says, 'when you get aboard the ship, I'd very much like for you to upload the hard drive to this.'

Natasha stops with a frown, twisting the drive in her palm. 'I was under the impression, sir, that this was a hostage situation.'

'Is anything ever what it seems.'

But he clasps his hands behind his back and wishes her good luck. 'You'll need it.'

 

 

'It's the only one we got left,' the kid says, doing a pretty good job of not acting terrified 

Natasha flashes a grin at Morales, who is also waiting for her ride to show. 

'You getting the Corvette?' Morales says with a envious whistle. 

Natasha gives her a smug look. 'They giving you the dino?'

Morales sighs long-sufferingly and stares at the Boeing as it pulls into the hanger. It's a beast, for sure, but it's also seven years old. Practically a retiree in their field.

'Apparently everything's taken. I reckon Carter's screwing with me for teasing her about being a soccer mom.'

'She's on Steve right?' Nat says as the kid hands her the keys.

Morales snickers. 'Like a hawk. I don't know why they're keeping tabs, he's got more patriotism in his pinky than the rest of us put together. It's just sad.'

Natasha just shrugs, the particulars outside both their clearance levels. 'It's a pet thing,' she says, archly. 

Morales is handed her flight plan and signs the leave form before she speaks,  'If the dog cuts his leash, you gotta ask yourself why the collar was pulled so tight.'

 

 

Is anything ever what it seems, indeed. 

'Small scale extraction team' is not small at all when you factor in Captain America, Agent Rumlow and a few of Rumlow's crew. 

'All brawn,' she comments when she arrives on the tarmac and Rumlow gives her a gruff smile. 

'Romanoff, how long it been since we worked together?'

Tasha grins. 'Since you stopped getting the good stuff.'

'The good stuff include those alien people?'

Nat smirks. 'No, good stuff includes people with brains.'

He laughs as Steve arrives and it always is exciting seeing Steve in his natural habitat. But they've darkened his signature suit and he looks less monkey more mockery. Natasha can't even help but devour the good captain. He cuts a  _fine_ figure even if he is wearing the American flag. She supposes the stars are in all the right places.

'Shit, I'm still not used to him walking round. I used to have comics with him in them.'

Natasha just snorts and turns back to look at Rumlow. 'And you've been telling us all you're in your forties. Lies.'

 

  

Sitwell  _barely_ acknowledges them while the other analysts humbly offer thanks. Natasha just tucks herself into the cockpit, offering to fly. 

Once they reach altitude, she puts the plane on autopilot and ducks behind her seat to grab her bag, the boys snoring and Steve chatting to Jamirez about efficiency or something equally professional. She pulls out the card and stares at it, a little irritated that she brought it but curiosity wins out over pride and she opens it. 

Tony bet me fifty bucks you'd see the present, show up to my room and kick my ass, I bet him you'd kiss me. (I'm poor as shit, but I hope it makes sense.) Happy Birthday Tashka.

She lets out a soft 'oh' in surprise when she unfurls the box. 

A small silver necklace with a metal arrow on the chain. 

  

 

She puts the necklace on, zips up her suit and texts Clint, 'you're an idiot.'

 _Hawk-I:_ Happy Birthday Tashka

 _Widow:_ You owe me big time. 

 For now, it is enough. 

 

  

She makes him meet her on the tarmac and they walk.

‘I thought you’d seen the necklace and freaked,’ Clint answers honestly, after she asks why he’d forgotten to say anything.

‘And then?’ Natasha hedges.

Clint stops, shifts to face her, ‘I tried to tell you, you know, in Stockholm.’

She frowns. _When?_

Clint smiles, his lips twitching. ‘I said things had changed and I thought you’d say what are you talking about and I could explain and stutter it out and you’d not talk about it until you came to terms with it.’

Natasha shrugs non-committal. Pretty apt.

‘What does the necklace mean,’ she asks, looking really uncomfortable.

‘What?’

‘Well it’s either a metaphor for you owning me-‘

Clint glares at her. ‘Shut up Nat. It’s a _sentiment._ ’

‘And? What does it mean?’ Natasha asks.

He twitches, looks over his shoulder and turns back to eye her intently.

‘Alright look, I’ll fold. I’m going to say that after New York and Phil and all that shit, I pushed you away and then I blamed you for giving me space.’

Nat gives him a decadent smile for the admission but she’s nothing if not thorough. ‘So you gave me a necklace with an arrow on it, because…?’

‘Be _cause._ ’

‘Well?’

Clint huffs at her. ‘Because we’re partners but it’s more than that.’

Nat shakes her head. Not good enough.

‘Because,’ and then he kisses her.

It’s so much teeth and Clint pulls her to him and Natasha thinks if he was going to use the easy way out then he could’ve done it months ago. She grins against him when she worries his bottom lip and Clint grunts, pulling her to him, his fingers digging into her hipbones and she levels herself against his chest, sinuous and lithe and Clint huffs.

‘Mine.’

‘Caveman,’ Natasha says, prettily.

He grins.

 

 

If Nat had known working with Steve was going to result in the downfall of an entire fucking corporation ( _her_ fucking monolith) she never would've signed up for his liberal democracy masquerading as the three amigos. But then again, she never would've expected Nazis. NAZIS. In the 21st century. In that sense, she feels the full brunt of her age hit her.

But before all that, before she gets shot by the ghosts of her past, before she starts collecting bird-related superheroes, she is standing outside a vending machine in civilian clothes, staring at a USB she rescued from a pirate ship, doubting everything she has been told, everyone she has ever given the luxury of trusting.

And then Nicholas Joseph Fury, born December 21st 1951 dies on April 24th 2014 and Natasha thinks it’s the beginning of her end.

 

 

Relief is something delicious but relief is also transient and what is the life of one over the loss of another? When Natasha looks at Steve, she understands true loss. Because there is something so unjust about having  _everything_ taken from you. Your context, your love, your best friend. When Natasha looks at Maria, she understands true loyalty. Not to a company but to a cause. And when Natasha looks at Nick, she understands true resilience. 

Because fuck if assassination is going to keep that man dead. 

 

  

When she's staring down the barrel of the end of the world, sometime later (she knows its her name on there with the list of security threats and Tony's and Banner's and the Avengers were always a liability, weren't they, wasn’t that the point?) Natasha doesn't do that thing where life flashes before her eyes or where she wishes she'd done something. 

She adjusts the three piece suit the Councilwoman is wearing and gets her phone out. She doesn't text Clint I love you or I miss you because that's a fucking shitty thing to do and if you're sending messages of unspoken platitudes you're practically signing your own death certificate. 

Instead, she texts him a date. 12:01am on January 1st, 2015 and the coordinates to a small hotel on the outskirts of Thessaloniki.  

For the first time in his life, Clint responds quickly. 

'It's a date.'

 

 

Natasha had wrongly presumed things in her life. A handful of things. Mistakes she had made that if she could have, she would have readily gone back in time to attempt to fix. Instead, she lives her life attempting to atone for her handful of mistakes. Her red ledger.

And when she finds Clint Barton tearing the Triskelion to shreds, she marks this moment down as a personal failure.

SHIELD meant very different things to her and Clint. To her it was a refuge, a shelter. But shifting alliances and changing power structures were a reality imbedded into her very DNA. As she'd said, it was practically an insult to her heritage to assume that power was static. To presume your organisation would run so ostentatiously on the line of moral ambiguities for the foreseeable future was idealism. 

And yet that was the very point of it.

And that was why it had not occurred to her that it would affect Clint so profoundly. Perhaps the blow was punctured by losing Phil, in that now Clint had very little to hold onto the memory of his mentor, except those excessively untrustworthy ones that had been tampered with by Loki. She understands that she had miscalculated what SHIELD had meant to her partner. To her it had been safety, to Clint, it had been home.

She thinks that it had a lot to do with upbringing. She had grown up feeling that attachment was childish and discouraged. But Clint had that desperate sense of attachment to the unorthodox notions of family he had experienced. From carnival folk, to the sense of organised structure at SHIELD, Clint had always felt the need to belong. To be needed.

She _knew_ this, sure. On a superficial level. In the sense that Natasha understood Clint's reckless abandon and disregard for authority was testing the bounds of respect and love of the people around him. But it was also an intense need to prove himself to his these adopted individuals that gave him some sense of self.

She comes to stand behind him, stands at the door for what feels like hours as he breaks everything in sight. The room is upended in his frustration and Natasha lets him work it out, until he sits down on the mattress and puts his hand into his hands.

'This.. I can't. Where do we even go?'

Natasha comes to sit beside him and shakes her head. 'It doesn't matter. We need to get out of here, right now. Stark's is a good start,' she amends, halfway, formulating a plan on her feet.

'They'll know I'm here,' Clint says, eyeing his barracks with a sentimentality she didn't know he possessed.

'They're going to start centralising assets and that includes Agents.. I imagine the cull starts pretty soon.'

 Clint just looks at her helplessly. 'What.. what do we..,' but he quietens and pulls a duffle from underneath the bed.

'We're going to be fine,' she tells him, seriously.

This is not the end of the world. In fact, this is the beginning.

 

 

In a funny way, Natasha feels freer than she's ever felt before in her life. All the passports, all the cash, all the exit routes she'd instigated all the way through her career on the 'good' side all came to a head.

And she didn't have to be the Black Widow anymore. She is just Natasha. It is enough to spend some time figuring out who that is.

 

 

‘I’m sorry I remind you of Phil,’ Natasha says, overriding the security codes of the Quinjet they’ve borrowed permanently.

She continues before he can interrupt, ‘no, stop, I don’t mean that sweetly, I just know that he was there for you from the beginning and now there’s no SHIELD, there’s just me and I’m a pretty poor substitute for anyone least of all Phil.’

Clint just frowns at her, startled into perturbed silence by her matter-of-factness.

She just shrugs, not expecting a reply. Clint eyes her as he starts to taxi the plane to the runway, he doesn’t speak until he can click the plane over to autopilot.

‘You make a lot of presumptions, Tasha,’ he tells her, low and affronted.

Nat grimaces sympathetically. ‘There’s no shame in taking comfort in the familiar, I should know.’

Clint huffs. ‘You think I’m using you to-‘

‘Assuage your guilt about Phil, sure,’ Natasha says. 

She’d come to terms with the fact that she’ll always be inextricably linked with the dead. Over so many continents, she’s always come to embody ghosts. With Ivan and Yuri and James, why should Phil be any different?

‘And what’s the rationale?’

‘Sometimes when you’re looking at me, it feels like you’re still waiting for him to come back.’

Clint just snorts and Tasha frowns. ‘What?’

‘I think you completely missed the part where I’ve been in love with you since, like, at least, Uppsala.’

Natasha busies herself with checking the air pressure gauge, feels her neck get really hot under her suit.

‘We’ve always had each other, even when we didn’t have Phil or SHIELD or anyone behind us. You’ve always had my back.’

Natasha can’t help but huff at him, narrowly avoiding rolling her eyes at him. ‘So this sudden confessional had nothing to do with Phil’s death?’

‘I could say the same for you.’

Natasha acquiesces. ‘It was losing you to Loki. I got jealous, thought I’d lost my cool particularities.’

Clint gives her a small smile. ‘You got it. And maybe, coming back from that and knowing I’d spilled my guts to a genocidal demi-god and you sitting in my room non-threatening and merciful.

‘Well, you forgave me for trying to kill you.’

‘Multiple times.’

Tasha grins. ‘Exactly.’

‘So what, we’re even now and so we might have a hope at having a normal relationship?’

Natasha lets out a sharp laugh. ‘Keep dreaming, Barton.’

 

  

It is Pepper who greets them on the helipad above the warehouse building, her face splitting into a broad beam when she sees them come out of the quintet. Banner appears in the foyer of the Stark offices, looking decidedly pleased. 

'I bet Stark it would take less than a week for you to come work for us.'

Natasha laughs. 'Traitor. We just want to sleep here. Then I've got a date with the DOD.'

'Bring me back some Republicans for desert,' Clint says, cheerfully. 

 

 

Stark has purpose built floors for them, although Clint’s floor becomes decidedly useless because they share Nat’s floor.

(Although, by the way Pepper exclaims that it’s going to be her shoe closet, Nat doesn’t think it’s going to waste.)

So the next morning, she crawls out of Clint’s arms, puts on a different kind of suit and goes to save the world, or screw it, same difference in this climate but if the scale of morality is the amount of deaths she has committed, she can say that maybe after the past week she is not dripping with red anymore, only a trickle, only a drop.

 

 

It’s a mess, to be sure, but like almost every mission she has ever had, she succeeds.

Clint texts her as she’s walking out of the Pentagon.

‘Nice bling, darling.’

 

  

Maria greets her in the car when she exits and Nat just sighs.

‘I thought you’d come find me sooner actually, Maria.’

Hill shrugs. ‘Thought I’d give you a rest after you saved the world.’

‘Again,’ Natasha says, pointedly.

Hill just laughs. ‘You know why I’m here. Are you in?’

Natasha can honestly say that working for Stark in _any_ capacity makes her a little nauseous.

‘Clint and I are thinking about going private.’

For the first time in her _entire_ life, Natasha thinks Hill looks genuinely surprised.

‘Have you considered resources?’ Maria asks and Tasha nods.

‘Which is why we want you to hire us as private contractors.’

Hill nods in understanding. ‘You want total control over the ops.’

Natasha nods, watching as Hill thinks it over.

‘And you want me to coordinate?’

‘You’re the best in the business.’

Natasha doesn't say, _or whats left of it_.

 

 

  

They stay until Stark unfreezes their assets (‘Love me.’) and Clint starts getting offers from the military, Nat from the CIA. Neither of them are interested.

‘You really want to do this?’

‘Shit Nat, I already told Morales she had a job.’

‘Oh yeah?’ she says moving to kiss him, relishing the way his arms tighten around her at the gesture.

‘She was very excited at the prospect of taking down HYDRA.’

‘She’s a relic too.’

‘We should hook her and Steve up.’

Natasha pulls a disgusted face. ‘I’m trying to have sex with you, let’s not.’

Clint lets her climb him like a tree, until she’s dragging her centre across his dick and the smirk slides right off his face.

  

 

It’s a little easier with all Stark’s resources but Nat still doesn’t see Clint for weeks on end, both hunting down their old contacts and the year disappears from her.

She agrees to meet Steve in Atlanta and he looks tired and haggard when they meet, tells her Sam is asleep and that Bucky, the Winter Solider, whoever the hell that ghost is, is nowhere to be found. There are still secrets there, ones that she doesn’t think are hers to tell and so she keeps them to herself. She helps when she can, sends Steve tips but eventually, she tells him to go home.

If anyone can help, it’s Stark.

Eventually, Christmas comes and goes in San Marino where she tracks down a few stray HYDRA agents, most she doesn’t know but those whose names she recalls stick with her, she is efficient but not merciful with their deaths.

 

 

On New Years Eve 2014/15 Tasha finds herself nowhere near a hotel in Thessaloniki. Instead, they barely make it out of the car into the apartment Stark kindly offers them in New Mexico. 

He’s dragging his fingers up her thighs and she growls, ‘bed, now.’

Clint is nothing if not obliging and they start to sweep the apartment before JARVIS’ voice greets them and tells them the perimeter is secure.

With that in mind, Clint grabs her hand and drags her to the bedroom. He stops every half-metre to gather her up, kisses her on the threshold of the bedroom.

His fingers pulls through her hair and Natasha can’t help but remember standing on a gangway, his eyes the colour of malice. He notices her stiffen and he places both hands on her waist.

‘Tash, tash,’ he breathes, ‘you would kill me, you would kill me before I hurt you.’

But she shakes her head, pulls him in for a kiss that tastes of blood and apologies.

‘It was always you, in there. Could’ve killed me, could’ve killed Fury, could’ve killed us all. But you didn’t.’

As she speaks, she gets to work on his shirt, wholeheartedly ignores the pained expression on his face, the guilt that will surely always linger.

‘I never said thank-‘

But she takes his nipple in her teeth and drags her nails down his chest, strangling his apologies with the brute force of action.

 

 

It’s exhilarating. There is at the same time an intense sense of urgency and an insane desire to take it as slowly as possible 

She will admit to being, in this instance, impatient.

Clint’s mouth is hot and god, fuck there is something really great about having all the time in the world. No more deadlines or LOAs or pressing obligations.

He hovers over her until she elbows him and eyes her, but she enjoys the weight, warm and heavy but importantly, it gives her friction.

Her hips buck up against his and Clint let’s out a soft moan, a sound, breathing as he is against the shell of her ear, that makes her pause.

It just... does it for her.

So she replicates the action, presses her hands into the sides of his hips and drags her centre over him, grinning when he coughs over a choke.

‘Less clothes, I’d prefer.’

Clint huffs but she tilts her hips up accommodatingly and lets him slip her underwear off until all she’s wearing is a bra.

 

 

He teases until she’s growling out his name like a threat and he just takes it as a compliment, the dog. He takes her clit and sucks and Natasha falls over the edge. It is like being able to breathe underwater. The feeling isn’t intense, she doesn’t scream, she just sighs.

Relief washes over her and Natasha feels calm for the first time in months.

 

 

It takes her a second to adjust their positions and then she takes him and licks all the way up before Clint can truly get his bearings back. 

His pupils dilate and he throws his head back, swearing that she’s going to be the end of him.

‘I’d like that,’ she says, releasing him with a harsh _pop_.

He grunts in reply, as Natasha swirls her tongue around the head, the underside sensitive and swollen.

She can’t take him whole but damn, Natasha’s not one to walk away from a challenge.

Clint’s whispering ‘shit, shit, shit’ but she silences him, drags her nails down his inner thigh and he hisses, ruddy and flushed in the cheeks.

Tortuously slow is the callcard of the day and Natasha keeps going until Clint can’t help but retaliate, his hips cant up to meet her and he’s biting his cheek to keep from screaming.

She grins, and asks as innocently as possible, ‘you ready?’

Clint gurgles out a groan. ‘Nat, _I’m not going to beg._ ’

And she didn’t consider it before, (should have, because really) but his admission just completely fucks her up. She’s wet, but now she’s aware that she isn’t in power in this situation, that he isn’t like all her marks or missions that let her play around. Clint is Clint.

So she kisses his tip and moves up, gently gently impaling herself on him. He reaches up, linking his fingers through hers, as Nat sinks lower, harsh intakes of breath as she becomes accustomed to the pressure.

It’s hard to keep a level head like this when Clint is staring up at her like she hung the moon. She closes them, can’t stare at reflections of herself that are so undeniably untrue but Clint squeezes her fingers.

‘Tasha, _please_ ,’ he whispers.

So she starts to move, starts to let the feeling take over. Starts to revel in the intimacy that not living on borrowed time is.

He keeps his hands at her hips, linked through hers, uses it to keep her centered and forward and Natasha can’t help but speed up. She has eons of self-control but there is nothing here to inhibit her. She wants _all_ of him.

‘Tasha, _Tashka,_ look at me,’ he says and her eyes fly open.

And with that, it starts to build.

It’s like climbing a vertical wall with nothing behind you but an empty abyss. It feels like struggling to breathe underwater. It feels like angling for relief when all you feel is coiled and tight and _needy._

He senses or perhaps just needs and grunts, ‘more,’ and Natasha can’t say that suggestion particularly disagrees with her so she lets him flip them over.

And god, fucking damnit.

He meets her with level, even thrusts and Natasha groans, when he hits her, drags her over another level, pushes up with intensity until she’s so close and she can’t, can’t keep her eyes open. Clint’s increasing tempo tells her he’s there too, right by her side and she can’t help the flush that pools around her neck in response to the intimacy.

It is unintelligible, the benedictions she murmurs as she reaches the crescendo. He keeps her close, his fingers latched through hers as she meets him thrust for thrust, until he presses a calloused thumb to her clit. And then.

And then.

It comes over her like a wave, hard and soft at the same time. She lets out a sharp hiss and Clint sighs.

‘Oh god,’ she whispers.

‘Yeah, fuck.’

‘We’ve never..’

‘Not like this.’

‘Not together.’

‘Damn. We’re brilliant.’

Natasha laughs, pulling him into a kiss. She doesn’t try to prove anything with it anymore.

 

 

She thinks that she's always loved him. Differently, sure, in the beginning. Harshly, fiercely, ruthlessly in Budapest and Perth and Santa Cruz. Angrily, venomously, unabashedly in Denpasar and Belgrade and Geneva. Intensely, silently, overwhelmingly in Brooklyn and Stockholm.

It occurs to her that it will take her a long time to figure out who she is now that every single one of her fallbacks is a hyperlink. Natalia Romanova, Natalie Rushmore, Natashenka Alianova, Natasha Romanoff.

And yet, it all doesn't really matter. Because she has one person that she has never had to be any one of those personas for. One person that she is completely herself with. No Black Widow. No Strike Team Delta. No ruthless, one woman kill squad. She is Tasha. A woman that can murder, maim and manipulate. But that can also save the world. That can assemble a specialist team of individuals that respect each other. That can be _unmade_ to come back with a semblance of _self_.  That can do all that _and_ have a functional relationship.

Well, functional is relative.

 

 

 

'Babe?'

'No.'

'Sweetheart?'

'Ugh.'

'Pumpkin?'

And then he laugh-chokes as she flattens him. 

'Are we clear, _doll face_?' she queries, knee pressed into his groin. 

Clint squints up at her, face contorting in pain. 

'You bet, darling.'

 

**Author's Note:**

> There you have it. I have half a mind to write a sequel about Steve/Bucky/Darcy but man, you'd need someone with a bucket load of talent that I don't have. 
> 
> As a side note, some of the mentioned characters actually exist in the MCU (Morales specifically is an AWESOME lady) but I didn't stick to canon as well I maybe could have. OVERALL though, it is pretty much 99% canon compliant to what we know. 
> 
> I do hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing this (because I did. SO MUCH.)


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